"on that balcony above the door, where the branch of ylang-ylang arches over. She is burying her face in a spray of the cool, sweet, greenywhitish stuff, and tossing a bit of it down to her young husband. He is there in the garden beneath her." "Then he isn't." Don Feliciano suggested, following my mood, "as wise as most young husbands are, or he would be in the balcony with her. Carpe diem-"

"That is where he had been, of course," I agreed. "But he'd just met to pluck tw ragerditnnhs-d ho'? gone down into the garden for a moment to pluck two oranges. Then she tossed the ylang-ylang to him, for fear he should think he was forgotten. You say she was very lovely?"

"Very," said Don Feliciano.

"I'm sure," said I, "that her spirit would trouble no one. I wish I might go into the garden. I want to be nearer the house. It attracts me very much. For all it has stood empty so long, it seems more livedin than any house I know. Or is Or is that only my fancy?"

"I feel the same thing," said my companion. "We can go into the garden. Or into the house itself, if you like. No one will care."

"But do you wish to go?" I asked. "They were your friends, and I can see that it pains you to renew the memories."

"It is a pleasant pain," said he, with his gentle, old man's smile. "For a long time I have been meaning to come here once more. glad to come with you."

I am

So we went down the path, moving almost as quietly as our long shadows did which went beside us, for the echo of a careless step on the flags would have seemed irreverent, as in a church where the Sacrament is resting on the altar. We pushed the barring shoots from before us carefully and so stood at last at the door under the little bal

cony. I tried it, and it did not yield. "It must be locked," I said.

"No," said Don Feliciano, "it is not locked. When they carried the girl out to her funeral, her husband came down the stairs behind her, I remember, and came out and pulled the door to behind him. He never went back into the emptiness of his house. That door has been shut since then, so far as I know, and that is fifty years and more. But it is not locked. Perhaps," he said with friendly dryness, "the hinges are a little rusty."

"Fifty years," said I, taking my "Let us go hand from the door. away and leave the house in peace. It would be trespassing."

"Push at the door," said Don Feliciano. "Put your shoulder to it. It does not matter if you break it down."

There was a commanding eagerness in his tone, and I obeyed him without question. At the first assault the door gave way and hung a moment trembling. Then it fell inward. The hinges had rusted clean away.

The noise of it, coming so suddenly in the stillness of the place, quite startled me. I held back voluntarily. Don Feliciano, for all his frailness, had steadier nerves. Without hesitation he stepped through the gaping doorway into the thick shadows.

"Come," he said, and once again I obeyed him without questioning.

But after the few steps which removed me from the square of light that poured through where the door had been, I found that I could go no further. It was so very dark there, after the brightness of the day outside, that I walked giddily, as if at any moment my foot might fall on emptiness. And that my steps and Don Feliciano's should make no sound. was a still more unnerving thing. We move noiselessly, as Not through freshly fallen snow.

an echo answered to our tread. Save for the faint rustle of our clothing, and our breathing, and the beating of my heart, I heard no sound.

"Come," Don Feliciano said again. "I know the house," and he took my hand and led me into that dark, terrific silence.

Presently I stumbled on the first step of a flight of stairs, though my companion had taken it unerringly. With groping feet I I mounted through a hot, stinging, musty air that bit my nostrils, till at last a floor was level under me again. We turned sharply to the right, and I felt that we passed through a door. And then Don Feliciano let my hand drop.

As he moved away and left me in that clinging darkness and dead silence, as I heard the whisper of his receding garments grow fainter and fainter, a kind of nervous panic seized me. I could have screamed like a woman.

"Come back, please," said I, laughing shakily. "I'm not afraid to say that I'm afraid of this dark

"It will be light now," Don Feliciano's voice answered me from a distance. I heard him fumbling with a catch. In another moment the shutters of a wide window were swung inward, and a sea of light poured in and almost drowned my vision. But with the coming of the light my silly panic left me.

And as my sight returned, a delighted surprise took hold of me instead.

Most men, I think, in the midst of the strange scenes of their travels in the body or in sleep, have had the experience of discovering some unfamiliar spot which breathed the welcome of familiarity. Every unknown detail was found in its expected place. They felt at home, as if they had returned to a loved haunt after many years and found

it all unchanged. So it was with me, as I gazed about that broad and dusky room.

I could have taken up life there at that very moment, not as one who camps beside the dead ashes of another's fire, but as one welcomed to an unforgetting circle around a glowing hearth.

Despite long disuse and the impalpable dust of years which lay heavy on floor and window-ledges and the great table in the center,it was the dust which had muffled our steps to eerie noiselessness,— no desolation was there and no emptiness. The room had an appealing air of cosiness, the same suggestion of being lived-in which the house had from the outside, and the garden, too.

I looked to see if Don Feliciano shared my mood.

The room had been left in that pleasant disorder with which very happy lives surround themselves. On the dust-strewn table, on the chairs. and on the walls, were all the little, unmeaning knick-knacks of a home. And the old man, with bowed head and lingering feet that barely stirred the dust, was moving from one object to another, gazing at them wonderingly and touching them with lovingly curious fingers.

So at last I understood that Don Feliciano truly was at home-that good, capable Dona Ceferina had not been the bride of his youth. "I ought to have guessed," I said contritely.

Don Feliciano turned, and the gray pallor of his face was very markedly increased. But he was smiling, and his smile was brighter than I had ever seen it. "You do not know," he said, "the happiness you have brought me. Look," he said and went to a tall chair which stood beside the table.

Over the back and arms of it dust was draped. I mean just that. The stuff that muffled the straight

lines and angles of the chair had all the easy, flowing curves and hollows of a fabric. And it was gray dust.

"You do not know what it is?" Don Feliciano asked. "That is the gown she danced in the night we were married. The day she died, she had told her muchacha to alter it so that she might wear it when she left her bed-she never thought of dying-and when the girl was called suddenly to help her, she flung it there. It has been there

ever since."

Very gently he put out a hand to stroke the thing. With the faintest puffing sound it vanished. A formless heap of dust lay on the broad seat of the chair and on the floor beneath it.

Don Feliciano looked at the dust and trembled.

"I touched it," he said, "and-it was not there."

Again contrition smote me. "Forgive me," I said. "I ought not to have brought you here."

The old man started; he had forgotten me. The same almost boyish smile lighted up his face. "You could not have kept me away," he said. "You think it hurts? You young people understand so little. We will open all the windows and let the light in. She used to like the house all open for the sunset."

So we flung the shutters open; those that faced the grove and the beach where the sparkle of the sleeping sea shot through the gloom between the tall columns of the palmtrunks and those that opened on the balcony above the sleeping garden and those that faced the west. And the light came in and chased the last dark shadow from the room. The day was very near its close then, and the world was rousing from its long siesta. Soon a fitful breeze came creeping down from the mountain to the ocean. It stirred the dust on the floor and set the drooping flowers in the garden nod

ding. It brought the odor of the unseen cinnamon to us in little gusts of fragrance, crescendo and diminuendo.

Then the unearthly glory of another royal sunset flamed out above Felicidad. We leaned on the sill of the western window together, Don Feliciano and I. Before us stretched the untrodden lane by which we had come. At the far end of it, about a well, young men and maidens were playing at drawing water. Beyond them were clustered the shaggy roofs of their homes. The smoke of the evening fires curled lightly above them, and beyond all, closing all, rose the long slope of guardian Solitario, trending steadily upward and forever upward till its last beclouded reaches were blended and lost in the liquid void of the sky. And over all the scene was the solemn peace of evening.

"So," said Don Feliciano, suddenly breaking the silence, “you think you'd like to live here?"

"Forgive me," I begged. "I could not know what I was asking."

"What is there to forgive?" he said. "You'd like to live here?"

"It's not a question of liking," I answered. "Never in all my life have I found any other place which was so homelike to me. But I should not dare-"

"I'm sorry," he said, "that I spoke so of misfortune."

"It is not that," I said quite seriously. "What I said in fancy I can say in earnest, too; that if any influence lingers here, it is the influence of a gentle woman. But I cannot intrude on a place hallowed by memories."

"But if it would not be intrusion," Don Feliciano persisted, "would you like to live here?"

I told him that I should.

"Then," said he abruptly, "you shall. To-morrow Dona Ceferina will bring a dozen of her muchachas-"

"Dona Ceferina?" I said, a bit surprised.

"Why not?" he asked. "I have kept the house closed too long. I thought I had shut up all the hopes and sorrows that were spent-gastados. I thought that they would die here and make the place a tomb, a House of Forgetfulness. I thought that I could start a quite new life outside.

"But it is all one life. The memories of the joys and sorrows are still here and still alive, but somehow changed. They are welcome now. I am glad to see them once again and to have others see them,

too. It has been a house of truer Forgetfulness than I thought. The pain of the past has vanished, but the good of it is remembered. I am happy to be here and to know that you will live here."

"Your face tells me that it is so," I said. "But I cannot understand it. I wish I could."

"You must not be impatient," said Don Feliciano, smiling encouragingly at me. "Wait for fifty years or so. Then I think you will begin to understand."

After that we were silent together till the darkness came.

It was not till the next afternoon that I suddenly remembered a matter usually considered of importance in the leasing of houses,-the rent, to wit.

At this point some sternly practical soul might impugn the veracity of this narrative-if it be a narrative, which I sometimes doubt, as I look back and find it inconsequential as life itself.

How, such a pragmatic creature might ask, was all this primitive magnificence to be paid for? Whence should a wandering misanthrope, a sort of maritime tramp whom even a muchacha who hardly owned the gown she stood in pitied for his poverty, meet the expenses of the new life he proposed to live? In short, as the ugly phrase goes, where did the money come from?

My answer is equally short. I had what I needed. Whence I had obtained the fascinating stuff; where I carried it; how I guarded it; all these are questions which I believe concern no one but myself.

That I had means to satisfy my whims should be clear to all reasonable persons from the fact that immediately I remembered there was such a thing as rent, I sought Don Feliciano out with the deliberate purpose of learning what mine was. to be and of paying it in advance. I could not have done that had I been penniless, as Pepita thought I was.

The subject of money had never been touched upon in any of its numerous aspects by Don Feliciano and me. But I felt that it was high time I ceased to be dependent on

my adoptive godfather's hospitality. And yet I felt a hesitancy, too.. The old man, with all his pleasant simplicity, had a kind of princely detachment from the more sordid concerns of life. It was hard to conceive of him as sitting at a receipt of customs. Had he possessed a chancellor, a bailiff, or any other thickskinned go-between, my errand would have been easier.

As it was, I had to meet him face to face.

"Don Feliciano," I told him bluntly, "you are, if you please, to consider this as a business call. I wish to speak to you as my landlord.”

"The house is out of repair?" he asked. "But of course it is. I ought to have thought of that. I will send some men."

"The house is sound enough," I said. "What I wish to speak of is my rent."

"Your rent?" he echoed. "What rent is that?"

"The rent of the house I am to live in."

"My dear Don Djon," he protested laughingly, "aren't you forgetting that you are to live in that house at my request, to please my fancy for having it alive again? There can be no rent for that, unless," he added, "you mean the rent-the subsidy-I owe you for putting up with the inconveniences.'

"They are so great!" I agreed laughingly. "No, Don Feliciano, I mean just what I said."

"My dear man," said Don Feliciano, so gently that his words car